


Time Yet To Learn

by jettiebettie



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-23
Updated: 2016-07-23
Packaged: 2018-07-26 07:49:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7566001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jettiebettie/pseuds/jettiebettie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the alarm she hears first, insistent and incessant, and on instinct she throws out a hand to silence it. </p><p>Except she swipes at nothing but air, because she's not in bed at the academy. This isn't the sound of her clock, this seat is definitely not her bed, and those flashing red lights absolutely mean something bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Yet To Learn

It's the alarm she hears first, insistent and _incessant_ , and on instinct she throws out a hand to silence it. 

 Except she swipes at nothing but air, because she's not in bed at the academy. This isn't the sound of her clock, this seat is definitely not her bed, and those flashing red lights absolutely mean something bad. 

 Pidge jerks back into full consciousness and begins to take in the information on her screens. So distracting is the data that flies by that it takes her a minute before the landscape beyond the translucent info-windows catches her eye. At first it seems like an unending field, but she blinks rapidly and catches the color of the world outside between flashes of red. 

 It's not a field, it's a wasteland. Barren, cracked land stretching out in front of her, with only an occasional, lone mountain on the horizon. Pidge feels her stomach drop and she brings up a comm-window. 

 "Guys? Where are we? What happened?" 

 Silence on the line, the occasional dead static. The alarms just seem to get louder even though intellectually she knows that they're not, but her pulse is pounding in her ears and panic grips at her chest. 

 "Hunk? Lance? SHIRO! Somebody!" she yells. Her hands begin to shake at the controls before she lets out a sound of raw frustration and slams a fist down on one of the consoles. " _Okay, I get it_!" Immediately the alarms go off, though the red lights continue to flash. Pidge breathes a sigh of relief anyway, the quiet finally giving her a chance to _think_. 

 Think. Think. 

 "Okay... Alright." Calming herself, she begins a diagnostics test, letting it run while she pulls up the planet's composition from scans of the area. 

 The atmosphere is.... tolerable, even if the temperature isn't really. Looking out, she appears to be in a desert during midday, but readings suggest a temperature barely above freezing. Little to no moisture for miles. The ground is mostly silica and other relatively familiar compounds. Pidge is about to run a scan for any sort of flora when a beep signals the end of the systems' check. 

 "Huh? Wait, what do you mean _unknown error_?" She leans forward, nose almost going through the screen. "No thrusters, no hydrolics, no energy routing to- We can't move and none of our signals can reach past the planet's orbit? Oh, come on!" 

 Pidge struggles with her harness, only now feeling the soreness from the crash in her arms and shoulders. Those are going to be some outstanding bruises to live with for a while. Angrily she pushes out of the pilot seat and heads to the back of the cockpit, grabbing her equipment bag on the way. She loosens a panel next to the door and starts to fiddle with the insides and seconds later the hatch hisses open. There's a sudden rush, as if all the warmth inside had been sucked out, and Pidge quickly extends her helmet's visor to full coverage after the first painful breath of too cold air hits her lungs. Her suit seems to be maintaining her body temperature just fine, but she doesn't want to press her luck. Pidge grips the sides of the door for a fraction of a second and then jumps out. 

 "Unknown error," she mutters bitterly. She tries to pull up the lion's basic schematics in her mind, anything to drown out the whirlwind of questions spinning around in her head. Where are the others? Are they okay? Is she alone here or are they just beyond the horizon? Pidge shakes herself to clear it, placing a sensor on the lion's metal body. "Well, Mr. Unknown Error, where are you erroring from?" 

-

  _I'd really would have liked to meet the minds who built you_ , Pidge thinks idly to herself half an hour later, watching numbers fly across her screen. _But I'm not sure if I'd shake their hands or wring their necks_. There’s something that’s keeping her equipment from smoothly communicating with the lion. All it will confirm is that there’s a hardware issue somewhere within the machine, something knocked out of alignment or possibly an electrical short that’s melted something important. To actually look for it by hand would potentially take hours, and if the creeping chill in her legs where’s she’s been sitting on the too cold ground tells her anything, it’s that she really doesn’t have hours before she’ll need to be back inside the cockpit. With a frown, Pidge turns to look at the face of the lion.

“Can’t you just show me? You’re hurt, right? Show me where!”

The lion remains still, as it has since the landing and Pidge clenches her teeth together, tears prickling the sides of her eyes out of frustration more than anything else.

“Two minutes,” she says, and then again, louder as she shouts up at it. “Two minutes! That’s how long Lance had his lion before it started talking to him! Hunk’s helped him out! So what gives, huh?” 

An impassive stare.

“What?” Pidge stands, angry with fists closed at her sides. “Am I not the paladin you wanted? I’m not good enough? Well guess what! Look around!” Pidge throws her arms wide and gestures to the wasteland. “There’s no one else here! You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not. So just... so just...!” She turns and punches one of the legs, her fist making a dull sound against the metal, and her knuckles hurt but not as much as her heart. She doesn’t bother pulling her hand back, instead she continues to press against the machine. “I need you,” she whispers, eyes shut tight against tears. “Matt, my dad... my friends... I can try to do it all on my own, but I’ll only get so far without you, so please...”

Suddenly, as if a spark runs from the surface of the lion through her arm, Pidge feels something connect in her head, like a wire going live.

  _you’ve rarely needed my help_

They’re not words, not really. It’s just a feeling, an understanding that she feels pull at the back of her brain making her gasp. Blinking the tears away, she looks back up into the lion’s face. Nothing has changed outwardly, but it suddenly no longer feels inanimate. Slowly, Pidge takes a breath.

"Could you help me now? At least tell me what's wrong with you so I can try and fix it. Help me help you, buddy!"

A few, quiet seconds go by before her equipment begins to beep aggressively at her, those nonsensical numbers finally becoming understandable lines of code. Pidge throws herself down to the mini-screen, eating up the information and analyzing it as fast as her synapses can fire. 

“Okay... okay! Yes, I can fix this! I can totally fix this!” she says excitedly, looking back up at the lion with a smile. She’ll have to manually work her way to the problem, but she should be able to get everything taken care of in an hour or two. “Just you wait,” she tells the lion, throwing her equipment bag over her shoulder and climbing up onto the leg. “Another few weeks and I’ll know you inside-out, backwards and forwards; there won’t be anything about you that I don’t know!”

And as creepy as she knows that sounds, Pidge swears she can feel amusement ripple through the metal under her feet.

**Author's Note:**

> (Did you know you can find me on tumblr at jettiebettie.tumblr.com? It's true.)


End file.
